Religion Dispatches
…tudies. Starting in the late 90s, though, Taylor ventured far afield with books on architecture, computer networks, economic markets, and even Las Vegas. In 2006, he released a book of photographs of animal skeletons in the desert. Taylor’s most recent book, After God, gathers these pieces together into a wide-ranging manifesto. He insists that the major social, ecological, and technological trends of today’s world are not in some way “outside” re…
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…the middlemen for the chance to come or simply to enjoy Israel’s economic boom. Others came as near-indentured servants who were forbidden to work for anyone but the employer who first hired them, until the Supreme Court finally ruled that this arrangement violated basic human rights, annulling in the process their discriminatory work permits. These “guest” workers, who today number between 250,000 and 400,000 (half of whom are illegal) did not on…
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…at feed cheaply off their precarious status at the bottom of our economic food chain? How to balance national security concerns with pragmatic ones over economic productivity? The debate has drawn the usual cast of advocates: policy wonks, border vigilantes, and religious leaders. Some religious leaders, that is: Others have been notable in their silence. In the case of Arellano, bishops from Mexico and the US, acting in congruence with longstandi…
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…f heart” immediately translates into open borders. The statement gives no tools for discernment, because the important distinctions between philosophical perspective and a theological perspective are not made. The concepts derived from scriptural admonitions to “render unto Caesar” (Matt. 22:21) and to submit to governing authorities (Romans 13) were emphasized throughout. Just Plain Mean I came away from the event feeling that these analysts and…
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…06, attending a busy and crowded prayer ceremony organized by the Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism. Devotees and pilgrims from all over the world, including China, had come there. I saw visitors from the Mainland China offering donations in Chinese currency, during a prayer session led by the 17th Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje. The donations came in small notes from the country of their origin. Helpers and translators were accepting and writing down…
Read More…and-a-half years ago, I wrote an essay for this magazine, titled “Secular Good, Muslim Bad“. It was a reflection on the initial protests which became the Arab Spring, before the counterrevolution kicked in and turned a hopeful cry for breathing room into a demented Arab Spring Cleaning. The vermin are fellow Arabs, demonized and derided for years, such that their blood becomes cheap. This happens all too often with minorities; what is unique abou…
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…fe upon leaving a movie—even the $2.50 I paid for the bargain matinee was too damn much. Unlike other critics of the movie who will complain that the princess was a frog for the entire movie, and that Disney stinted on the black princess, I’m going to go all out and say that the entire movie is a wholesale desecration of New Orleans, Creole culture, Cajun Culture, religion, zydeco music, the Evangeline story, and Louis Armstrong (I’ll get to that…
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I returned home this lovely and generous summer morning to find a book of essays by the equally lovely and generous poet Gerald Stern waiting in the mailbox. My son opened the package for me, as he likes to do, and I took up a wicker chair on the porch to dip into Stern’s prose. It won’t be long before my son, a teenager, discovers the magic of girls. We worry about helping him navigate the new world he is about to enter. There is some sweet spot…
Read More…hat right to access those and have them paid for, is that such a towering good that it would suffocate the rights of conscience?” It’s one of the bishops’ favorite arguments: that birth control is so cheap and so widely available that it isn’t even a question of whether the religious freedom of objecting organizations should be burdened by having to pay for it. The bishops have been claiming since 2012 that birth control is “ubiquitous and inexpe…
Read More…opulation) about comments by Angle’s pastor deriding the LDS Church as a “kooky” “cult.” More likely, it’s a move by Romney to appear relevant in the context of a Tea Party-infused, mortgage-meltdown-fueled voter backlash in Nevada. Nevada is about as volatile a place as you’ll find in the American West right now. It has the highest rate of mortgage foreclosures, mortgage fraud, unemployment, and bankruptcy in the nation. Over the last two decades…
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